As the science editor of Britain's second most popular daily newspaper, the Daily Mail, Michael Hanlon could be seen as this country's most influential climate sceptic. For years he sowed seeds of doubt about the science of climate change - what he called "a bugbear of modern life" and even now he sneers at the warnings of environmentalists and climatologists.

Over the past few years, as the rest of the world woke up to the reality that our fossil-fuel hungry lifestyles were fuelling global heating, Hanlon stubbornly rejected the 928 peer reviewed studies warning of dangerous climate change, calling the science a "great story" and dismissing the threat as mere "hot air from politicians". He delighted the oil lobby and the far right, when he argued:

"As a formula, it is hard to beat - disaster, floods, middle-class greed, dollops of guilt, angst at our shiny cars and our meretricious prosperity, hair-rending guilt that we are raping the planet. Like the Romans, we believe the gods will punish us for our naughtiness with thunderbolts and storms, fire and ice."

Hanlon's assertion that "the threat from climate change is still largely unproven" was as irrational then as it is now. It can only really be compared to a sports editor refusing to accept the Premier League table, instead publishing newspaper reports to claim that Sunderland won the cup last year and that Chelsea were relegated.

Hanlon emailed his friend, Benny Peiser, from Liverpool John Moore's University, about James Lovelock - the environmentalist and former Nasa scientist who invented the Electron Capture Device, which in turn revolutionised our understanding of the depletion of the ozone layer. Hanlon said:

"It strikes me that something should be done about Lovelock. I have read his book, and even I, as a humble fuckwit, can pull it to pieces."

Humble! Far from being humble, Hanlon was arrogant enough to write in the Daily Mail on September 15 2004, "Is there any evidence that in recent years extreme weather events such as tropical storms are more frequent or severe? The answer is a categorical 'no'." According to Sir David King, on the contrary, the answer is a categorical "yes". He explained:

"We have known since 1987 the intensity of hurricanes is related to surface sea temperature and we know that, over the last 15 to 20 years, surface sea temperatures in these regions have increased by half a degree centigrade. So it is easy to conclude that the increased intensity of hurricanes is associated with global warming."

Ignoring the world's top 2,000 independent climatologists from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Hanlon, in the Daily Mail on January 15 2005, mocked, "Will the activities of a few pesky homo sapiens with their cars and power stations really cause the earth that much bother in the long term?" Citing the "subtext" of a Michael Crichton novel for one of his sceptical articles, he even managed to infuriate the president of the Royal Society. The government's former chief scientific advisor, Lord May said:

"It demonstrates the flakiness of the Hanlon case that he should need to rely on a sci-fi writer who has previously warned of the dangers of bringing dinosaurs back to life and of nano-robots turning the world into grey goo. All entertaining scare stories, all complete nonsense."

Without a trace of embarrassment, an apology or even reference to his change of tack, Hanlon admitted, in the Daily Mail on 24 August 2006, "Few scientists now doubt that human activity, the burning of fossil fuels, is having an impact on global temperatures." In a clandestine and absolute about-face he crossed barbed lines and hoped nobody would notice. He clearly decided his position was no longer tenable. But how can someone with that much contempt for science then retain a job as a "science editor"?

David Miliband called Friday's UN report on climate change "Another nail in the coffin of the climate-change deniers." He's right. The tide is turning and the denial industry, which Hanlon epitomises, must surely be swept away by it.